Nov 18, 2015 Michael YuTrusts & Estates
Wendy C. Gerzog,
What’s Wrong with a Federal Inheritance Tax, 49
Real Prop., Tr. & Est. L.J. 163 (2014), available at
SSRN.
Professor Wendy Gerzog has written a thought-provoking article reviewing inheritance tax systems both in the United States and abroad, and then Professor Lily Batchelder’s proposed comprehensive inheritance tax (CIT). Professor Gerzog has three principal criticisms of inheritance tax systems: (1) they inequitably tax the recipient based on the closeness of relationship to the donor or decedent (which rationale is “neither a good measure of ability to pay nor an effective means of wealth redistribution,”); (2) they lack a gift tax back-up; and, (3) they apply to more individuals, increasing administrative costs and decreasing compliance rates. (P. 200) As to Professor Batchelder’s CIT, Professor Gerzog supports its elimination of the “disparity of burdens for some beneficiaries under the current transfer system” and its solving “the problems of timing and valuation abuses that involve actuarial problems,” but Professor Gerzog contends that the CIT “engenders its own problems”: (1) increased family wealth; (2) increased valuation abuse; (3) increased recordkeeping costs; (4) increased compliance problems; and, (5) increased complexity. (P. 201.) Professor Gerzog concludes that “the transfer tax system works relatively well and has significant practical and theoretical advantages over a federal inheritance tax or a CIT.” (P. 201.)
Professor Gerzog believes that basing tax rates on a decedent’s relation to a beneficiary is “objectionable on fairness considerations.” (Pp. 164-165.) Given that most wealthy decedents leave their property to other wealthy individuals and the majority of beneficiaries are the decedent’s close relatives, there are comparatively few estates with non-relative heirs, and “no policy rationale supports subjecting those few unrelated individuals to either a higher or a lower tax rate.” (P. 165.) Professor Gerzog contends that an inheritance tax with greater tax rates when there are “a fairly small number of the beneficiaries” or “a distant familial relationship … of the decedent’s beneficiaries” “cannot realistically achieve the reduction of concentrated family wealth and its associated power.” (P. 166.) Continue reading "Theoretical and Practical Concerns in Moving to a Federal Inheritance Task"
Nov 17, 2015 A. Michael FroomkinJotwell
This week Jotwell is having its first-ever fund-raiser. Regular visitors to the site probably already noticed a large yellow popup informing then of this fact, but people who get Jotwell via the RSS feed or by email will have been denied that experience. There is no reason for the hundreds of people who read us via the RSS feed–or by email–to be left out.
So here’s the pitch: Please will you make a small donation to support this journal? All the faculty who write for and edit Jotwell do so for free, but even so, producing the journal is not costless: we need to pay for our server, for our student editors, and for various types of technical and design support, including a coming makeover to keep up with a procession of software updates. This adds up.
We don’t charge for Jotwell and we don’t run any ads, and we would like to keep it that way. If every Jotwell reader donated just $7 a year, we’d cover all of our costs…but alas not everyone is generous.
If you can afford it, please don’t be a free rider. If you like us lots–or even just some–please make a small donation? Of course, if you want to make a large one, we would not say no to that either.
Thank you.
Yours sincerely,
A. Michael Froomkin
Jotwell Editor-in-Chief
Nov 17, 2015 Sheila ScheuermanTorts
Ronen Perry,
Pluralistic Legal Theories: In Search of a Common Denominator, 90
Tul. L. Rev. ___ (forthcoming 2015), available at
SSRN.
Can pluralistic legal theories be unified around a common framework? That’s the tantalizing question that Ronen Perry tackles in his recent essay. Perry is searching for a holy grail—a unifying principle for all pluralistic theories of law. Even if the holy grail does not exist, the quest itself proves interesting and worthy of consideration.
Modern tort theorists have advanced at least three rationales for the tort system: deterrence, individualized justice, and compensation. Under a deterrence-economic perspective, the goal of the tort system is to prevent accidents in an efficient manner. On the other hand, an individualized justice theorist views the tort system as a way to remedy a wrong caused by one to another. Finally, under a compensation or distributive justice theory, tort law’s goal is to spread loss and provide compensation to victims of tortious injury. But few scholars accept these multiple theories, and instead focus on their own singular rationale. Continue reading "A Holy Grail for Pluralist Theory?"
Nov 16, 2015 Allan ErbsenCourts Law
Conduct channeled through cyberspace can cause harm in physical space. That leakage across a conceptually amorphous border has befuddled courts attempting to adapt personal jurisdiction doctrine to the Internet. At least two distinct problems have combined to produce an inconsistent and unstable jurisprudence. First, the Internet is a buffer between the defendant and the forum. This technological intermediary diffuses the defendant’s geographic reach, complicating analysis of the defendant’s contacts and purpose. Second, activity on the Internet often leads to intangible harm, such as a sullied reputation or devalued trademark. These intangible injuries can manifest in places that are difficult to predict ex ante and to identify ex post.
Accordingly, the Internet creates spatial indeterminacy in a legal context that reifies geographic boundaries. Many courts have reacted by trying to tame complexity with an ostensibly elegant tripartite framework for analyzing jurisdiction. The “Zippo test”—named after an influential yet often-criticized district court decision—posits that jurisdiction based on Internet contacts depends on pigeonholing websites into categories. A “passive” website that merely provides content is a weak basis for jurisdiction, while jurisdiction usually exists over websites that are commercial platforms for repeated transmission of files. Between these extremes are “interactive” sites that require a context-sensitive inquiry into the nature of the interactions. Continue reading "Personal Jurisdiction Based on Intangible Harm"
Nov 13, 2015 Cyra ChoudhuryFamily Law
If you are married to a miser who controls the family finances and refuses to give you money outside household expenses, what can you do about it other than get a divorce? What are the consequences of unequal power over property in marriage? In her article The Illusion of Equality: The Failure of the Community Property Reform to Achieve Management Equality, Elizabeth Carter reminds family law scholars and practitioners of the importance of these questions raised so memorably in the 1953 case of McGuire v. McGuire. There, Lydia McGuire sued her husband for maintenance and discovered that there was no legal remedy for her situation. In other words, the law could not compel spouses to be equitable about the family finances and property or give redress to past inequalities in an extant marriage. In the decision denying Lydia McGuire relief, Justice Messmore of the Nebraska Supreme Court found that “[t]he living standards of a family are a matter of concern to the household, and not for the courts to determine…. As long as the home is maintained and the parties are living as husband and wife it may be said that the husband is legally supporting his wife and the purpose of the marriage relation is being carried out.”
Community property states, which historically had been more egalitarian in distributing ownership of marital property during marriage and at dissolution than common law states before their reform of post-dissolution property distribution, still had gendered management rights while marriages were intact. In most extant marriages, management rights or the rights to invest or use property such as paychecks, investments, and even real property had historically been vested in breadwinning husbands. Confronted with the possibility of the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment and the evolving Supreme Court jurisprudence in equal rights, community property states reformed their management rules in the 1960s and 70s to be gender neutral. One would imagine that with the increase in women’s participation in the workforce during this period and the reform of rules to formally bestow equality, de facto management would also become more or less equal. However, these neutral laws that “facially granted the spouses equal management rights over their community property” have largely failed to equalize management rights of that property in fact. (P. 854.) That is to say, the rules did not change the practices in family property management. In her article, Carter reminds us that now some seventy years after the McGuire case, and in spite of the dramatic changes in family and gender roles and the reform in community property states to gender-neutral management rules, the ability to control family resources continues to be demarcated unequally along gender lines in heterosexual marriages. Continue reading "A Different Kind of Marriage Equality"
Nov 12, 2015 Leigh OsofskyTax Law
Jason Oh,
Will Tax Reform Be Stable?, UCLA School of Law, Working Paper Series Law & Econ. Paper No. 15-16 (2015), available at
SSRN.
Fairness, efficiency, simplicity, and revenue-raising capability (not necessarily in that order) have long been the hallmarks of good tax policy. In a forthcoming article, Will Tax Reform Be Stable?, Jason Oh introduces a new criterion: stability. Oh persuasively argues that certain tax reform may be more or less stable than others, and contends that it is possible to analyze and predict stability. Moreover, as Oh explains, understanding stability is essential in order to determine the durability of any good (or bad) tax reform.
This article is impressive because of both its potential importance and its ambition. Oh is right, of course, that, all else equal, a reform that quickly unravels is unlikely to be as impactful as one that does not. In this regard, the article’s insights are akin in importance to the realization that taxpayers will change their behavior in response to legislation (for instance, by decreasing their sales of capital assets if the capital gains tax goes up), a realization that led to the practice of dynamic scoring of legislation. In pushing us to recognize a new dimension for evaluating tax policy, Oh has to color outside the familiar lines of existing debates. His willingness and ability to do so merits attention, and may well garner it in policymaking circles. Continue reading "A New Tax Policy Criterion: Stability"
Nov 11, 2015 Joanna GrisingerLegal History
Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar,
Administrative War, 82
Geo. Wash. L. Rev. 1343
–1445 (2014), available at
SSRN.
The study of administration is thriving – so much so that even people outside the field are taking note. A recent review essay in the Boston Review (and a cautionary response by Karen Tani) demonstrate the breadth of this scholarship, which includes studies that push the origins of the administrative state back to the early republic and studies that examine (in a term coined by Sophia Lee) administrative constitutionalism throughout the federal government. The New Deal continues to loom large, however, in research into the expansion and entrenchment of the modern administrative state; according to Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, this account is incorrect. As he argues, “during the 1930s the federal administrative state remained a pale shadow of its future self.” (P. 1354.) Instead, much as James T. Sparrow argues that World War II made the modern American state, Cuéllar argues that World War II made the modern American administrative state.
Cuéllar describes how pre-World War II agencies were hamstrung by limited powers and limited resources, limits which soon became impractical. World War II changed the political and economic context in which agencies operated, opening the door to legal changes that strengthened the agencies. Mobilization for war required greater administrative capacity, which in turn required more money to pay for agency operations. In response, federal courts expanded agencies’ subpoena powers, which markedly improved agencies’ ability to investigate. Courts also moved from a formalist understanding of the non-delegation doctrine (Schechter) to a functionalist one (Yakus) that legitimated broad congressional delegations of authority to agencies. And Congress enabled mass taxation to pay for expanded administration. (Funding is key to any discussion of administrative capacity; a chart in Cuéllar’s appendix showing the increase in federal employees during the war make this clear.) By giving agencies the tools they needed to endure, Cuéllar argues, wartime actors embedded administrative governance in American political life. Continue reading "The World War II Roots of the Modern American Administrative State"
Nov 10, 2015 Jill FamilyLexImmigration
Jason A. Cade,
Enforcing Immigration Equity, 84
Fordham L. Rev. (forthcoming 2015), available at
SSRN.
In the late twentieth century, Congress amended the immigration laws to severely limit the power of immigration judges, the agency’s adjudicators, to grant relief from removal on equitable grounds. At the same time, Congress expanded the categories of activities that render a foreign national removable. The result of the statutory tinkering was that it was much easier to be removable and much harder to be granted relief from removal.
The severity of those reforms is well known. Professor Jason Cade’s contribution to the discussion is that he persuasively argues that those statutory reforms from twenty years ago are linked to the most visible controversy in immigration law right now: President Obama’s executive actions creating the chance for a temporary reprieve from removal. Continue reading "A Need for Equity in Immigration Law (Congress, are you listening?)"
Nov 9, 2015 Richard MoorheadLegal Profession
The literature on lawyer ethics has been dominated by philosophy and sociology for many years. Consistent with the rise of behavioral economics and the more urgent focus on ethics in business schools, social psychology is increasingly being used to offer insights in the field (see for example Andrew M. Perlman, A Behavioral Theory of Legal Ethics, 90 Ind. L.J. 1639 (2015)). Take Elaine Doyle, Jane Frecknall-Hughes and Barbara Summers‘ piece An Empirical Analysis of the Ethical Reasoning of Tax Practitioners. This piece uses a tax-specific version of Rest’s original Defining Issues Test (DIT) to compare the moral reasoning of Irish tax practitioners and a control group of non-tax specialists. Rest’s DIT is well established and designed to test the level of moral reasoning applied by test respondents when solving. Test takers read moral dilemmas and provide an indication of which kinds of reason they find most important in deciding the moral dilemma. The reasons cover basic justifications like self-interest, rules and ‘post conventional’ principles. The test uses six levels, and the higher up the scale, the higher the level of moral reasoning that is applied by the subject of the test. Higher levels of performance on the test have been associated with more ethical decision making. The authors study covers tax practitioners (which includes lawyers).
The results the authors claim for the study are: (i) tax practitioners generally reason at lower levels in tax contexts than in social scenarios (i.e. they can decide ethical problems in a more principled manner, but do not in tax situations); (ii) that the professions do not appear to attract people who generally reason at lower levels (i.e. tax does not, on the evidence here, attract particularly bad apples); and (iii) that practitioners’ moral reasoning appears to be affected by training/socialization in their professional context (in particular tax practitioners in private practice demonstrate lower levels of moral reasoning than practitioners working for the Irish revenue service). They summarize their results as follows:
The fact that tax practitioners do not reason significantly differently from non-specialists in the social context suggests that individuals whose reasoning is less principled than the norm (as measured by the non-specialist control group) are not self-selecting into the tax profession. …Once the context changed to tax, however, differences in moral reasoning were evident, with tax practitioners utilizing significantly lower level moral reasoning than non-specialists who remained consistent in their reasoning across both contexts. This difference was substantial in size, with the level of principled moral reasoning being 34% higher in non-specialists. (P. 333.) Continue reading "Care to take a peek into the mind of tax lawyers?"
Nov 6, 2015 W.A. EdmundsonJurisprudence
Jeremy Waldron,
Immigration: A Lockean Approach,
NYU School of Law, Public Law Research Paper No. 15-37 (2015), available at
SSRN.
Approximately eleven million people currently reside in the United States as undocumented aliens. Most of these are so-called “economic” immigrants, who do not qualify for political asylum. Due to armed conflicts in the Middle East, approximately 350,000 migrants illegally entered countries of the European Union in the first eight months of the current year. Many of these will qualify for political asylum, but many will not; for from a legal perspective they, like the vast majority of US “illegals,” have immigrated primarily for economic reasons. Not to pillage and plunder, but to seek a better life by taking up opportunities for work in these wealthier and more stable countries. In other words, they come and keep coming mainly in order to bargain freely with legal residents who will pay for their labor.
The nations of Earth claim the right to exclude non-citizens from their territories, and many actively do so. Except in extraordinary circumstances, would-be immigrants have no recognized human right to be admitted or to remain. Illegal immigration, then, can present a complex set of policy questions whose answers involve balancing a range of reasons, both for and against policies such as amnesty, adjustment of legal status, management of quotas, enhanced border enforcement, construction of physical barriers, and deportation. The reasons going into the mix include public attitudes, human hardship, monetary costs of many kinds, impacts on wages, crime rates, demand for public services, and intangibles such as community homogeneity and “quality of life.” Jeremy Waldron rightly rejects the view that the question is essentially one of policy or the application of a settled ethics of national sovereignty. Waldron has rarely shied from the role of public intellectual, and here he seems poised to embrace it with uncommon vigor. Continue reading "Long Shadows and Clubbable Democracies"
